must be able to localize itself within its immediate surroundings, continuously recalculate its position as it makes its way through the danger area, and simultaneously refine the map it is generating,” says graduate engineer Christian Frey of the IOSB. To make this possible, he and his team have developed an algorithm toolbox for the robot that runs on a built-in computer.

Eugene R. Zubarev and his team at Rice University in Houston (Texas, USA) introduced a new pre- treatment process for gold nanorods that could accelerate their use in medical applications.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optro- nics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Karlsruhe, Germany, have now developed a roaming land robot that autonomously recon- noiters and maps uncharted terrain. The robot uses special algorithms and multi-sensor data to carve a path through unknown territory.

“To be able to navigate independently, our mobile robot has to fulfill a number of requirements. It

Gold nanorods are normally produced in a con- centrated solution of cetyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and are thus coated in a double layer of CTAB. The CTAB is only deposited onto the surface, not chemically bound. In an aqueous envi- ronment, the CTAB molecules slowly dissolve. This is problematic because CTAB is highly toxic. Simply leaving out the CTAB is no solution because without this coating the nanorods would clump together. In order to make the rods stable as well as biocom- patible, various more or less complex methods of pretreatment have been developed. However, for many of these processes, it is not known how much of the toxic CTAB remains on the nanorods. Ano- ther problem is that the pretreatment can disrupt the uptake of the nanorods in to cells, which dra- stically reduces the success of photothermal cancer treatment.